SAS-like acoustic color processing for a single-hydrophone sonar platform

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of using sonar data collected with a single-hydrophone to generate synthetic aperture sonar (SAS)-like images that display acoustic color information. Our previously-developed SAS-like acoustic color processing typically applies a coherence analysis framework to channels formed using the data of two hydrophone subarrays. Application of this method to single-hydrophone data requires significant modifications to the original framework since a synthetic aperture must be formed over the data from different pings, and hence a different approach to forming the data channels must be used. For this study, data collected using a single hydrophone mounted on a moving rail system that captures a buried underwater object from multiple aspects is used. The images generated by applying both a more conventional omega-k SAS and the revised SAS-like acoustic color processing methods to this data are evaluated based on their ability to provide information useful for detection, identification, and localization of objects.